Forbidden Liaisons - Twilight of Medicine

A teenager tells her mother that she plans to become sexually active. She is given an unpublished semi-autographical novel her physician-father wrote twenty years ago. It depicts the happenings in a failing Philadelphia hospital, including staff indiscretions. She then realizes that revealed past liaisons could ruin friendships among families, including her circle of friends. More

This is a novel within a novella. The novel is set in Philadelphia in a failing hospital in a crime-ridden neighborhood. The stresses of medical practice and the hospital administration are compounded by lawyers, gangs, drug dealers and police investigations. Malpractice claims mount. Personal relationships are strained. Desperate measures are tried to remain solvent and to reduce staff defections.The novella takes place twenty years later at a ski holiday/birthday party in Taos, NM for the former hospital chief-of-staff. Three couples who remained colleagues over the years were invited along with their college-age children who had become close friends. The daughter of the former chief of staff is given a quasi autobiographical novel he wrote but never published. This is to give her perspective on the friend she is considering for her first lover. Therein she gets a deep insight into what transpired behind the scenes and the secret liaisons among her parents and the other invitées, relationships that, if revealed, could destroy friendships that include her own peers.

Ernest H. Christman got his MD from the University of Pennsylvania. He did his residency in Ophthalmology at the Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary, a Harvard University teaching hospital. He holds two patents on optical devices.He served as a captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, stationed in Verdun, France. After a stint in academic medicine, he went into private practice.His non-medical publications include books on teaching reading via phonics and Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican pottery, available at http://www.tutorialpress.com and http://www.amazon.com